The left, which is no longer the humanist and universalist left, has accustomed us to perverse complacency with Islamism and postures bordering on anti-Semitism: Jean-Luc Mélenchon who refuses to take a break in his 2012 campaign despite the killings committed by Mohammed Merah (who, I remind you for the distracted who are more and more numerous, killed French soldiers who seemed “original” and therefore traitors, Jewish children including an 8-year-old girl behind whom he ran to execute it at close range); the same Mélenchon who implies that there is always an “event” which diverts attention during the electoral campaigns to serve the victory to the far right nebula (which is everywhere except at home), implied Merah was instrumentalized from within the power of the extreme right, implied his crimes exist only to prevent him, Mélenchon, from coming to power; Danièle Obono and Danielle Simonnet who welcome with pride and smiles the Briton Jeremy Corbyn, banned from the Labor Party for criminal complacency with anti-Semitism, but who, still for Mélenchon, is a victim of the Israeli Mossad; Insubordinate France as a whole, which makes eyes at the dirtiest Islamism by following the Eric Coquerel doctrine, which has borne fruit with more than 70% of French Muslims having slipped an LFI bulletin into the ballot box; the indescribable Houria Bouteldja who, between two racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic remarks which are never reproached to him, congratulates Mélenchon and his disciples on the efforts they are making towards the “natives” who openly hate France; Jean-Luc Mélenchon always – besides is there another pilot in the plane Nupes? – who insults the very republican president of Crif, Yonathan Arfi, by linking him to the far right, etc.
I could go on like this for pages and pages listing the crap on the borderline of judiciable anti-Semitism to which Mélenchon and his people have accustomed us since… the massacre of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. It was not just fear that turned the founding president of La France insoumise upside down. It’s not just the villainous political opportunism. It’s even worse. It was Islamism that reopened the floodgates of good old anti-Semitism on the left, celebrated in his time by Jean Jaurès who, in April 1895, went to spend a few days of vacation in Algeria, on which he reports in The Dispatch of Toulouse, May 1 and 8, 1895, noting with enthusiasm that “under the rather narrow form of anti-Semitism a true revolutionary spirit is spreading in Algeria”; and to embroider on “Jewish power” and to salute “Jewish usury” which reconciles against it “the European and the Arab”.
The socialist left then links the Jew to big capital as during the International Socialist Congress in 1891, where a motion to say the least ambiguous torn by the teeth by an American Jewish delegate rejects “anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic excitations”. Until the Dreyfus affair which will create a break between the majority of socialists and anti-Semitism, the left will continue to link the Jew to the Bank and to corrupt power.
The left reaches an unprecedented level of delirium
Today the massacres committed by the Islamists, new allies against capitalism since the disintegration of the proletariat, have revived a good old anti-Semitism on the left, as after the Suez expedition in 1956 then the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars and the Israeli victory that will turn the country of refuge into an imperialist country – therefore an enemy. Anti-Zionism comes to feed anti-Semitism with a ladle, Israel becomes the new excuse for the expression of anti-Semitism, as François Furet wrote in 1978: “The victorious Israeli takes in the new configuration the place that occupied the Jewish plutocrat in the imagination of both right and left in the 19th century.” Islamists have dishonored anti-Zionism.
The skids of the new left are not. Anti-Semitism bordering on crime is part of the long history of the left.
With the Medina controversy, the left reached an unprecedented level of delirium. Ecologists, socialists and rebels confuse the verb to defend the arrival of a singer who has never hidden his acquaintances with anti-Semitic Islamism and who pleads clumsiness and ignorance. Easy, so easy. And the guardians of the Mélenchon temple to refer all criticism to the fachosphere. Easy, so easy. The Medina controversy is the resurrected moldy left.
* Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity